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Bragging Rights

“We’ve created a website where we’ll post photos of our new baby,” the blast email announced, with a link and cue, “Click on the small pictures to enlarge them.” The sender? My daughter. The baby? My first grandson!

Could this mean that I wouldn’t get snapshots to carry with me, ready to trot out at the slightest mention of our family’s newest addition? Today I could whip out my phone to show off the new baby, but not then.

Her sister mails me photos of her daughters, a practice she started when they were newborn and thankfully, has kept up. I see those photos all day every day. Slipped into the frame of my bedroom mirror, clinging to my refrigerator or tacked to the cork board in my office, they fill my eyes and heart. “Thought you’d enjoy these,” she scribbles, enclosing new photos in birthday and holiday cards, and on no occasion at all. She knows the latest ones won’t replace the ones I love. I’ll find more space to display them. Put them in albums? Years might go by before I’d see them again.

My grandson started life with his own website. Of course he did: His dad is a techie and his mom frequents Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. “Please honey,” I protested, “send me pictures I can hold in my hand and use to exercise the bragging privileges guaranteed under the Universal Convention of Grandmother’s Rights.”

This topic comes frequently to mind when I look at photos of my ancestors. Will the digital media generations in the future be able to read our digital images of today? Hard drives fail, DVDs/CDs don’t last forever, and who knows what future technology lies ahead. Make prints – and duplicates – of those cherished images!